Imagine someone’s first day in crypto. They heard promises about owning their own money, accessing global markets, and participating in the new economy. They download a wallet, buy some ETH, and find an interesting app. Then it happens.
“Please switch to the base network.”
That? They frantically Google, watch a YouTube tutorial, and maybe they figure it out, maybe not. Most simply leave, and one study found that 80% of cryptocurrency users abandon blockchains within 90 days.
The biggest innovation of the last decade (the proliferation of powerful blockchains) has inadvertently created Web3’s biggest weakness: a user experience so fragmented and clunky that it alienates all but the most determined users.
And the most obvious symptom of this failure? The humble “Network Switch”, a feature that has become a symbol of everything that holds us back.
The MetaMask years taught me everything
When I was at ConsenSys a decade ago, the mission was simple. Bring the world to Ethereum through MetaMask. Back then, there was a chain available to MetaMask users. Users could simply focus on the applications, the possibilities and the revolution we were building. MetaMask was spectacularly successful as a gateway with millions of users and billions in volume.
But watching its evolution revealed the fundamental problem of our industry. The “Networking” dropdown menu that appeared when other networks launched was not a feature, but rather an admission of failure. We had prioritized technical expansion over user understanding.
The brutal truth is that if users have to think in chains, we are already lost.
Why everyone hates using cryptocurrencies
Do you want to use Ethereum assets in a Solana application today? Fasten your seatbelt. First, find a bridge (good luck choosing the safe, compliant, and low-cost option). Connect your wallet. Approve tokens. Pay gasoline. Wait for confirmations. Change networks in your wallet. Log in again. I hope nothing has gone wrong. Check out three different block explorers to keep track of your assets.
It’s crazy. We live in the digital equivalent of the pre-Internet dark ages, when you had to know if a service was on AOL or CompuServe and manually dial in to different networks. The Internet did not win because it had better technology. He won when that complexity disappeared.
Every network change costs us users, through gas fees and loss of time. Every confusing transaction ends with adoption. Every “wrong network” error message pushes widespread acceptance further away. We are not losing to traditional finance because it is better. We are losing because they are simpler.
Developers are drowning too
Wallets are blamed, but they only show the mess underneath. The real disaster lives at the base.
A founder recently told me his breaking point. “We launched Ethereum and saw real traction. Users loved it. Then we tried to expand to Solana and Sui to reach more people. Suddenly, we’re learning entirely new programming languages, duct-taping chains and incomplete bridges together, maintaining three separate codebases. Six months later, we gave up on expansion. The complexity was killing us.”
This story repeats itself everywhere. Teams spend more time managing infrastructure than creating products. Liquidity is fragmented between chains. Users get confused about which version to use. Innovation is suffocated under operating expenses.
We are forcing users to be their own travel agents in a world of incompatible airlines. Do you need to move from Ethereum to Solana to Arbitrum? Discover the connections yourself. Book each section separately. I hope your assets arrive. What we desperately need is Expedia for blockchains. Something that manages the entire trip invisibly while users focus on their destination.
The solution already exists
The solution demands more than better wallet interfaces or smoother bridges. We need string abstraction. We need the ability for applications to interact with any chain natively, making the underlying blockchain invisible to users.
This technology exists today. Several teams are building it. Account abstraction solutions like ZeroDev improve the wallet user experience, and cross-chain messaging solutions like Chainlink CCIP help move data from chain A to chain B. Blockchains like ZetaChain (where I’m a lead contributor) approach this differently. From day one, they enable applications spanning all major chains, including the Bitcoin network, which is not typically supported by cross-chain smart contract platforms.
Imagine a universal layer that securely connects to all chains, where a single smart contract manages assets like stablecoins and logic everywhere simultaneously. Users see a simple one-click action, such as exchanging native BTC for ETH, depositing Ethereum stablecoins in a yield app on Solana, or accepting payments in any token on any chain. The protocol automatically handles all complex cross-chain execution. No pop-ups. No changes. No anxiety about being on the “right” network.
The infrastructure works. What’s missing is admitting that our current approach has failed and committing to implementing something radically simpler.
Time to choose
The crypto industry is at a crossroads. We can continue to build for ourselves, adding more chains, more bridges, more complexity and remain a niche in finance. Or we can finally put users first.
Do you remember why we started this movement? To create a better financial system. To give control to people. Eliminate intermediaries. None of that matters if regular people can’t use what we build.
The network switch should become a museum piece, a relic from when we were too focused on technology to see humans trying to use it. All major advances in computing occurred when complexity was hidden. From command lines to GUI, from manual IP addresses to domain names, from desktop software to cloud services.
Our time has come. The technology to make blockchains invisible is here, tested and ready. The question is not whether we can fix the Web3 user experience.
The question is whether we have the courage to admit that we broke it in the first place.
